Abstract #2

Garvin, P. (2005). The government domain: why Google Uncle Sam? Law Library Research Xchange. Accessed March 4, 2005 from http://www.llrx.com/columns/govdomain2.htm.

This article is a comparison between two government search facilities, Google Uncle Sam and FirstGov. The author first runs through the pros and cons of the functionalities of each. Uncle Sam has the noted capabilities of Google behind it--especially their ranking system. However, they only search .gov and .mil websites, ignoring those government sites with .edu or .com endings. Also, there is no way to filter out the mass of state government entries. FirstGov has more advanced search functions, such as picking the document format or the specific domain (omitting things such as the 50 state websites). However, it doesn't have the power of Google behind it (or the ranking system). The author conducted comparison searches and found that while Google's ranking system returned more recent results, FirstGov responded with more relevant results overall. Her overall advice is to use both, or if possible, more than these two. Also, she recommends to use FirstGov's directories and other indexed resources.